Developers are gearing up for a fiercely competitive hack-fest at a heavyweight Linux conference in Adelaide this month.

The hack-fest is a feature of the Linux.conf.au conference, which touts itself as one of three international grassroots Linux conferences worldwide. The conference — to which more than 450 delegates are believed to have confirmed their attendance — is being held from 14-17 January at the University of Adelaide.

Developers will compete to write the highest-quality program running on Linux which can play the cookies version of Tetrinet, a Tetris-like game. The judges will base their determination on the quality of the game-play made available by the entries and the ingenuity of the algorithms used. Developers can get a download of the client and try the game on a tetrinet server.